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Image Source: JFrog Security Research Patches have been released for  two security flaws  impacting the Curl data transfer library, the most severe of which could potentially result in code execution. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2023-38545  (CVSS score: 7.5) - SOCKS5 heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability CVE-2023-38546  (CVSS score: 5.0) - Cookie injection with none file CVE-2023-38545 is the more severe of the two, and has been  described  by the project's lead developer, Daniel Stenberg, as "probably the worst Curl security flaw in a long time." It affects libcurl versions 7.69.0 to and including 8.3.0. "This flaw makes Curl overflow a heap-based buffer in the  SOCKS5  proxy handshake," the maintainers said in an advisory. "When Curl is asked to pass along the hostname to the SOCKS5 proxy to allow that to resolve the address instead of it getting done by Curl itself, the maximum length that hostname can be is 255 bytes.&quo

The maintainers of the  Curl library  have released an advisory warning of two security vulnerabilities that are expected to be addressed as part of an forthcoming update set for release on October 11, 2023. This  includes  a high-severity and a low-severity flaw tracked under the identifiers CVE-2023-38545 and CVE-2023-38546, respectively. Additional details about the issues and the exact version ranges impacted have been withheld owing to the possibility that the information could be used to "help identify the problem (area) with a very high accuracy." That said, the "last several years" of versions of the library are said to be affected.  "Sure, there is a minuscule risk that someone can find this (again) before we ship the patch, but this issue has stayed undetected for years for a reason," Daniel Stenberg, the lead developer behind the project, said in a message posted on GitHub. Curl, powered by libcurl, is a  popular command-line tool  for tra

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in N-Able's Take Control Agent that could be exploited by a local unprivileged attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. Tracked as  CVE-2023-27470  (CVSS score: 8.8), the  issue  relates to a Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use ( TOCTOU ) race condition vulnerability, which, when successfully exploited, could be leveraged to delete arbitrary files on a Windows system. The security shortcoming, which impacts versions 7.0.41.1141 and prior, has been addressed in version 7.0.43 released on March 15, 2023, following responsible disclosure by Mandiant on February 27, 2023. Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use falls under a category of software flaws wherein a program checks the state of a resource for a specific value, but that value changes before it's actually used, effectively invalidating the results of the check. An exploitation of such a flaw can result in a loss of integrity and trick the program into performing actions that it shouldn't

A new vulnerability disclosed in GitHub could have exposed thousands of repositories at risk of repojacking attacks, new findings show. The flaw "could allow an attacker to exploit a race condition within GitHub's repository creation and username renaming operations," Checkmarx security researcher Elad Rapoport  said  in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Successful exploitation of this vulnerability impacts the open-source community by enabling the hijacking of over 4,000 code packages in languages such as Go, PHP, and Swift, as well as GitHub actions." Following responsible disclosure on March 1, 2023, the Microsoft-owned code hosting platform has addressed the issue as of September 1, 2023. Repojacking , short for  repository hijacking , is a technique where a threat actor is able to bypass a security mechanism called popular repository namespace retirement and ultimately control of a repository. What the protection measure does is preven

Software services provider Ivanti is  warning  of a new critical zero-day flaw impacting Ivanti Sentry (formerly MobileIron Sentry) that it said is being actively exploited in the wild, marking an escalation of its security woes. Tracked as  CVE-2023-38035  (CVSS score: 9.8), the issue has been described as a case of authentication bypass impacting versions 9.18 and prior due to what it called an due to an insufficiently restrictive Apache HTTPD configuration. "If exploited, this vulnerability enables an unauthenticated actor to access some sensitive APIs that are used to configure the Ivanti Sentry on the administrator portal (port 8443, commonly MICS)," the company  said . "While the issue has a high CVSS score, there is a low risk of exploitation for customers who do not expose port 8443 to the internet." Successful exploitation of the bug could allow an attacker to change configuration, run system commands, or write files onto the system. It's recommen

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the Python URL parsing function that could be exploited to bypass domain or protocol filtering methods implemented with a blocklist, ultimately resulting in arbitrary file reads and command execution. "urlparse has a parsing problem when the entire URL starts with blank characters," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in a Friday advisory. "This problem affects both the parsing of hostname and scheme, and eventually causes any blocklisting methods to fail." The flaw has been assigned the identifier  CVE-2023-24329  and carries a CVSS score of 7.5. Security researcher Yebo Cao has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue in August 2022. It has been addressed in the following versions - >= 3.12 3.11.x >= 3.11.4 3.10.x >= 3.10.12 3.9.x >= 3.9.17 3.8.x >= 3.8.17, and  3.7.x >= 3.7.17 urllib.parse  is a widely used parsing function that makes it possible to break dow

A four-year-old critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiOS SSL has emerged as one of the most routinely and frequently exploited vulnerabilities in 2022. "In 2022, malicious cyber actors exploited older software vulnerabilities more frequently than recently disclosed vulnerabilities and targeted unpatched, internet-facing systems," cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from the Five Eyes nations, which comprises Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and the U.S.,  said  in a joint alert. The continued weaponization of  CVE-2018-13379 , which was also one among the most exploited bugs in  2020  and  2021 , suggests a failure on the part of organizations to apply patches in a timely manner, the authorities said. "Malicious cyber actors likely prioritize developing exploits for severe and globally prevalent CVEs," according to the advisory. "While sophisticated actors also develop tools to exploit other vulnerabilities, developing exploits for cri

Users of Metabase, a popular business intelligence and data visualization software package, are being advised to update to the latest version following the discovery of an "extremely severe" flaw that could result in pre-authenticated remote code execution on affected installations. Tracked as CVE-2023-38646 , the issue impacts open-source editions prior to 0.46.6.1 and Metabase Enterprise versions before 1.46.6.1. "An unauthenticated attacker can run arbitrary commands with the same privileges as the Metabase server on the server you are running Metabase on," Metabase said in an advisory released last week. The issue has also been addressed in the following older versions - 0.45.4.1 and 1.45.4.1 0.44.7.1 and 1.44.7.1, and 0.43.7.2 and 1.43.7.2 While there is no evidence that the issue has been exploited in the wild, data gathered by the Shadowserver Foundation shows that 5,488 out of the total 6,936 Metabase instances are vulnerable as of July 26, 202

Cybersecurity agencies in Australia and the U.S. have  published  a joint cybersecurity advisory warning against security flaws in web applications that could be exploited by malicious actors to orchestrate data breach incidents and steal confidential data. This includes a specific class of bugs called Insecure Direct Object Reference ( IDOR ), a type of access control flaw that occurs when an application utilizes user-supplied input or an identifier for direct access to an internal resource, such as a database record, without any additional validations. A  typical example  of an IDOR flaw is the ability of a user to trivially change the URL (e.g., https://example[.]site/details.php?id= 12345 ) to obtain unauthorized data of another transaction (i.e., https://example[.]site/details.php?id= 67890 ). "IDOR vulnerabilities are access control vulnerabilities enabling malicious actors to modify or delete data or access sensitive data by issuing requests to a website or a web appli

Adobe has released a fresh round of updates to address an incomplete fix for a recently disclosed ColdFusion flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The critical shortcoming, tracked as  CVE-2023-38205  (CVSS score: 7.5), has been described as an instance of improper access control that could result in a security bypass. It impacts the following versions: ColdFusion 2023 (Update 2 and earlier versions) ColdFusion 2021 (Update 8 and earlier versions), and ColdFusion 2018 (Update 18 and earlier versions) "Adobe is aware that CVE-2023-38205 has been exploited in the wild in limited attacks targeting Adobe ColdFusion," the company  said . The update also addresses two other flaws, including a critical deserialization bug ( CVE-2023-38204 , CVSS score: 9.8) that could lead to remote code execution and a second improper access control flaw that could also pave the way for a security bypass ( CVE-2023-38206 , CVSS score: 5.3). The disclosure arrives days

A Microsoft Windows policy loophole has been observed being exploited primarily by native Chinese-speaking threat actors to forge signatures on kernel-mode drivers. "Actors are leveraging multiple open-source tools that alter the signing date of kernel mode drivers to load malicious and unverified drivers signed with expired certificates," Cisco Talos said in an  exhaustive two-part report  shared with The Hacker News. "This is a major threat, as access to the kernel provides complete access to a system, and therefore total compromise." Following responsible disclosure, Microsoft  said  it has taken steps to block all certificates to mitigate the threat. It further stated that its investigation found "the activity was limited to the abuse of several developer program accounts and that no Microsoft account compromise has been identified." The tech giant, besides suspending developer program accounts involved in the incident, emphasized that the threat a

A few weeks ago, the 32nd edition of RSA, one of the world's largest cybersecurity conferences, wrapped up in San Francisco. Among the highlights, Kevin Mandia, CEO of Mandiant at Google Cloud, presented a retrospective on  the state of cybersecurity . During his keynote, Mandia stated: "There are clear steps organizations can take beyond common safeguards and security tools to strengthen their defenses and increase their chances of detecting, thwarting or minimizing attack [...] Honeypots , or fake accounts deliberately left untouched by authorized users,  are effective at helping organizations detect intrusions or malicious activities that security products can't stop ". "Build honeypots" was one of his seven pieces of advice to help organizations avoid some of the attacks that might require engagement with Mandiant or other incident response firms. As a reminder, honeypots are  decoy systems  that are set up to lure attackers and divert their attentio

The threat actors behind the ransomware attack on Taiwanese PC maker MSI last month have leaked the company's private code signing keys on their dark website. "Confirmed, Intel OEM private key leaked, causing an impact on the entire ecosystem," Alex Matrosov, founder and CEO of firmware security firm Binarly,  said  in a tweet over the weekend. "It appears that Intel Boot Guard may not be effective on certain devices based on the 11th Tiger Lake, 12th Adler Lake, and 13th Raptor Lake." Present in the leaked data are firmware image signing keys associated with 57 PCs and private signing keys for Intel Boot Guard used on 116 MSI products. The Boot Guard keys from MSI are believed to impact several device vendors, including Intel, Lenovo and Supermicro. Intel Boot Guard is a  hardware-based security technology  that's designed to protect computers against executing tampered UEFI firmware. The development comes a month after MSI  fell victim  to a double

PHP software package repository Packagist revealed that an "attacker" gained access to four inactive accounts on the platform to hijack over a dozen packages with over 500 million installs to date. "The attacker forked each of the packages and replaced the package description in  composer.json  with their own message but did not otherwise make any malicious changes," Packagist's Nils Adermann  said . "The package URLs were then changed to point to the forked repositories." The four user accounts are said to have had access to a total of 14 packages, including multiple Doctrine packages. The incident took place on May 1, 2023. The complete list of impacted packages is as follows - acmephp/acmephp acmephp/core acmephp/ssl doctrine/doctrine-cache-bundle doctrine/doctrine-module doctrine/doctrine-mongo-odm-module doctrine/doctrine-orm-module doctrine/instantiator growthbook/growthbook jdorn/file-system-cache jdorn/sql-formatter khanamiryan/

A malicious Python package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository has been found to use Unicode as a trick to evade detection and deploy an info-stealing malware. The package in question, named  onyxproxy , was uploaded to PyPI on March 15, 2023, and comes with capabilities to harvest and exfiltrate credentials and other valuable data. It has since been taken down, but not before attracting a total of  183 downloads . According to software supply chain security firm Phylum, the package incorporates its malicious behavior in a setup script that's packed with thousands of seemingly legitimate code strings. These strings include a mix of bold and italic fonts and are still readable and can be parsed by the Python interpreter, only to activate the execution of the stealer malware upon installation of the package.  "An obvious and immediate benefit of this strange scheme is readability," the company  noted . "Moreover, these visible differences do not prevent

A sophisticated attack campaign dubbed  SCARLETEEL  is targeting containerized environments to perpetrate theft of proprietary data and software. "The attacker exploited a containerized workload and then leveraged it to perform privilege escalation into an AWS account in order to steal proprietary software and credentials," Sysdig  said  in a new report. The advanced cloud attack also entailed the deployment of crypto miner software, which the cybersecurity company said is either an attempt to generate illicit profits or a ploy to distract defenders and throw them off the trail. The initial infection vector banked on exploiting a vulnerable public-facing service in a self-managed Kubernetes cluster hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Upon gaining a successful foothold, an XMRig crypto miner was launched and a bash script was used to obtain credentials that could be used to further burrow into the AWS cloud infrastructure and exfiltrate sensitive data. "Either cry

A malicious Python package uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) has been found to contain a fully-featured information stealer and remote access trojan. The package, named  colourfool , was identified by Kroll's Cyber Threat Intelligence team, with the company calling the malware  Colour-Blind . "The 'Colour-Blind' malware points to the democratization of cybercrime that could lead to an intensified threat landscape, as multiple variants can be spawned from code sourced from others," Kroll researchers Dave Truman and George Glass  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. colourfool, like  other rogue Python modules  discovered in recent months, conceals its malicious code in the setup script, which points to a ZIP archive payload hosted on Discord. The file contains a Python script (code.py) that comes with different modules designed to log keystrokes, steal cookies, and even disable security software. The malware, besides performing defense ev

Malicious actors have published more than 451 unique Python packages on the official Python Package Index (PyPI) repository in an attempt to infect developer systems with  clipper malware . Software supply chain security company Phylum, which  spotted the libraries , said the ongoing activity is a follow-up to a campaign that was initially disclosed in November 2022. The initial vector entails using  typosquatting  to mimic popular packages such as beautifulsoup, bitcoinlib, cryptofeed, matplotlib, pandas, pytorch, scikit-learn, scrapy, selenium, solana, and tensorflow, among others. "After installation, a malicious JavaScript file is dropped to the system and executed in the background of any web browsing session," Phylum  said  in a report published last year. "When a developer copies a cryptocurrency address, the address is replaced in the clipboard with the attacker's address." This is achieved by creating a Chromium web browser extension in the Window

GitHub on Monday disclosed that unknown threat actors managed to exfiltrate encrypted code signing certificates pertaining to some versions of GitHub Desktop for Mac and Atom apps. As a result, the company is  taking the step  of revoking the exposed certificates out of abundance of caution. The following versions of GitHub Desktop for Mac have been invalidated: 3.0.2, 3.0.3, 3.0.4, 3.0.5, 3.0.6, 3.0.7, 3.0.8, 3.1.0, 3.1.1, and 3.1.2. Versions 1.63.0 and 1.63.1 of Atom are also expected to stop working as of February 2, 2023, requiring that users downgrade to a  previous version  (1.60.0) of the source code editor. Atom was officially discontinued in December 2022. GitHub Desktop for Windows is not affected. The Microsoft-owned subsidiary said it detected unauthorized access to a set of repositories, including those from deprecated GitHub-owned organizations, used in the planning and development of GitHub Desktop and Atom on December 7, 2022. The repositories are said to have be

Security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in Netcomm and TP-Link routers, some of which could be weaponized to achieve remote code execution. The flaws, tracked as  CVE-2022-4873  and  CVE-2022-4874 , concern a case of stack-based buffer overflow and authentication bypass and impact Netcomm router models NF20MESH, NF20, and NL1902 running firmware versions earlier than R6B035 . "The two vulnerabilities, when chained together, permit a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC)  said  in an advisory published Tuesday. "The attacker can first gain unauthorized access to affected devices, and then use those entry points to gain access to other networks or compromise the availability, integrity, or confidentiality of data being transmitted from the internal network." Security researcher  Brendan Scarvell  has been credited with discovering and reporting the issues in October 2022. In a related developme